Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Congress Notices the Loss of Tenure

The US
Congress has released an important study on the use and abuse of contingent
faculty at American institutions of higher education. Although many people
inside and outside of higher ed are starting to know something about this issue,
this report places the loss of tenure and the use of part-time faculty on the
national political agenda.

The introduction
to the report locates the growth of non-tenure-track faculty within a
historical perspective: “The post-secondary academic workforce has undergone a
remarkable change over the last several decades. The tenure-track college
professor with a stable salary, firmly grounded in the middle or upper-middle
class, is becoming rare. Taking her place is the contingent faculty: non-tenure-track
teachers, such as part-time adjuncts or graduate instructors, with no job
security from one semester to the next, working at a piece rate with few or no
benefits across multiple workplaces, and far too often struggling to make ends
meet.” Just as so many other
professional middle-class jobs are being downsized and casualized, the
government is beginning to see how higher education has also been reshaped by
neo-liberal policies.

The
report highlights the contradiction of relying on colleges to prepare people
for good jobs, while the people teaching at these institutions have bad jobs:
“Increasing the number of Americans who obtain a college degree or other
post-secondary credentials is a key to growing and strengthening the middle
class and ensuring the country’s global competitiveness. Yet the expanding use
of contingent faculty to achieve this goal presents a paradox. These
instructors are highly educated workers who overwhelmingly have post-graduate
degrees. They perform work critical to our national efforts to lift the next
generation’s economic prospects. In 2009, CNN Money ranked college professor as
the third best job in America, citing increasing job growth prospects.The Bureau of Labor
Statistics predicts post-secondary teachers as having faster than average
employment growth over the next decade.Having played by the rules
and obtained employment in a highly skilled, in-demand field, these workers
should be living middle-class lives.”

Although
in the popular imagination, professors still represent one of the most
attractive careers, the reality of this labor market is far from ideal: “More
than one million people are now working as contingent faculty and instructors
at U.S. institutions of higher education, providing a cheap labor source even while
students’ tuition has skyrocketed. Traditionally, adjuncts were experienced
professionals who were still working in or recently retired from their industry
outside of academia, with time on their hands to teach a class or two at the
university or community college. Adjunct work supplemented their income;
teaching was not their main job. Such adjuncts still exist. But national trends
indicate that schools are increasingly relying on adjuncts and other contingent
faculty members, rather than full-time, tenure-track professors, to do the bulk
of the work of educating students. Today, being a part-time adjunct at several
schools is the way many instructors cobble together full-time employment in
higher education.” Part-time and contingent faculty are thus a symptom of the
more general dismantling of the middle-class professions.

The
congressional report also ties the casualization of the academic labor force to
the question of educational quality:
“contingent faculty earn low salaries with few or no benefits, are
forced to carry on harried schedules to make ends meet, have no clear path for
career growth, and enjoy little to no job security. The contingent faculty
trend appears to mirror trends in the general labor market toward a flexible,
“just-in-time” workforce, with lower compensation and unpredictable schedules
for what were once considered middle-class jobs. The trend should be of concern
to policymakers both because of what it means for the living standards and work
lives of those individuals we expect to educate the next generation of
scientists, entrepreneurs, and other highly skilled workers, and what it may
mean for the quality of higher education itself.” While the report does argue that many
non-tenure-track faculty bend over backwards to provide the best education
possible, their working conditions often prevent them from performing to their
full potential.

This
report grew out of an open online forum at the behest of Rep. George
Miller. He asked contingent faculty to
write in and respond to a series of questions, and then his staff analyzed some
of the trends. For instance, they found
that the average annual salary of the people responding was $24,926 and that
75% did not have benefits. One respondent added the following: “Considering that students pay $565 per
course, and that there are approximately 20 students per class, adjuncts are
paid approximately 4% of what the university takes in even though we execute
the core requirements of the university. As an open enrollment university with
86% Title IV students, dedicated adjuncts must provide extensive,
time-consuming feedback frequently up to 20 hours per week, which averages a
wage of less than $10 per hour.” As my own research has consistently shown,
higher tuition often results in less money going into instructors’ salaries;
instead undergraduates are forced to secretly subsidize administrative growth,
sponsored research, graduate and professional education, and expensive
extra-curricular activities.

To its
credit, the report does acknowledge some of the reasons why undergrads are
paying more for lees as faculty are forced to work for poverty wages: “In
today’s lean era, schools have often chosen to balance their budgets on the
backs of adjuncts. Outsized administrator salaries, marketing operations, and
campus frills recently have received significant attention. Increased budget
transparency for institutions of higher education would be a critical step in
understanding the nature and necessity of this now-pervasive labor practice and
whether and how it may be changed.”

Let us
hope that this report forces the government to look seriously at my plan to tie
full funding for public higher education to a requirement that 75% of the
faculty are full-time and at least 50% of the state and federal funding goes to
direct instructional spending. Although
we can make some improvements on the campus level, we need a national solution
to a national problem.

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